Coming next week June 20-21 Meeting #2 of the NAS study on Microbiomes of the Built Environment. Meeting is free to attend in person or online and the agenda includes some amazing people so it should be worth checking out. Some more detail from their website is below: The study’s second public meeting will be held …

A little update here. Last week a group of us launched a new participatory science project on the microbiome of cats. It is called “kittybiome” and we have launched a Kickstarter fundraiser for the project — more information about the project and how one can get involved can be found at the Kickstarter home page: …

There are many possible ways in which climate change could impact human health. The U. S. Global Change Research Program has issued a new draft report on this topic and is soliciting public comments about this report (see USGCRP Climate for more information). The report is The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: …

We have recently been awarded a new research program by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation to further develop out understanding of how bacterial, archaeal, viral and fungal communities interact on indoor surfaces. This research will be led by Jack Gilbert (University of Chicago), in collaboration with Chris Henry (UChicago), Brent Stephens (Illinois Institute of Technology), …

I generally try to avoid any type of discussion of the age of researchers and I also generally never ask people about their age. But this time it is in a story so I think it is OK to mention: Jack Gilbert of Argonne National Laboratory is on Crain’s Chicago 40 Under 40 2014 list. This …

Think hotel rooms are gross? An elegant study led by Jack Gilbert, published Thursday in Science Reports, suggests that our resident microbes could help ease our minds on this issue, as they very quickly populate hotel rooms (and houses, more on that below) to make our hotels microbiologically identical to our homes within 24 hours. …

Note – Jonathan Eisen invited Jack Gilbert to write a post about the Earth Microbiome Project especially in light of the recent paper on the topic by Gilbert et al. (see Eisen’s blog post about this paper here). Post by Jack Gilbert submitted by email to Jonathan Eisen. The Earth Microbiome Project started as …

If you have any interest in large scale microbial ecology – either to do it yourself or to make use of the results or to just watch it as it happens, you should read this paper: BMC Biology | Full text | The Earth Microbiome project: successes and aspirations. It outlines the history and goals and …

Got pointed to this paper by automated Google Scholar searches that I have for many of the authors of the paper: Conditionally Rare Taxa Disproportionately Contribute to Temporal Changes in Microbial Diversity in mBio by Ashley Shade, Stuart E. Jones, J. Gregory Caporaso, Jo Handelsman, Rob Knight, Noah Fierer, and Jack A. Gilbert. In the paper (which is, …

There is an article by Carrie Arnold in the new issue of EHP (Environmental Health Perspectives) should be of interest to some people out there: EHP — Rethinking Sterile: The Hospital Microbiome. In the article, Carrie Arnold discusses Jack Gilbert’s hospital microbiome project, hospital acquired infections, DNA based surveys of microbes, and work from the …